Lauren Frayer

Lauren Frayer covers India for NPR News. In June 2018, she opened a new NPR bureau in India's biggest city, its financial center, and the heart of Bollywood—Mumbai.

Before moving to India, Lauren was a regular freelance contributor to NPR for seven years, based in Madrid. During that time, she substituted for NPR bureau chiefs in Seoul, London, Istanbul, Islamabad, and Jerusalem. She also served as a guest host of Weekend Edition Sunday.

Lauren has also contributed to The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the BBC.

Her international career began in the Middle East, where she was an editor on the Associated Press' Middle East regional desk in Cairo, and covered the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in Syria and southern Lebanon. In 2007, she spent a year embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq, an assignment for which the AP nominated her and her colleagues for a Pulitzer Prize.

On a break from journalism, Lauren drove a Land Rover across Africa for a year, from Cairo to Cape Town, sleeping in a tent on the car's roof. She once made the front page of a Pakistani newspaper, simply for being a woman commuting to work in Islamabad on a bicycle.

Born and raised in a suburb of New York City, Lauren holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from The College of William & Mary in Virginia. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese, rusty French and Arabic, and is now learning Hindi.

Tens of thousands of protesters marched on college campuses across India on Monday, saying a new citizenship law is unconstitutional because it treats Muslims differently from Hindus, Buddhists and other religious groups.

Less than 2 miles down the coast, towering blue-and-white cranes dwarf the lighthouse, as does a contemporary glass and stucco office building — the Chinese headquarters of a sprawling new port complex.

On Dec. 26 last year, in a town surrounded by tea and rubber plantations in central Sri Lanka, residents discovered Buddhist statues had been vandalized on the side of the road. In the middle of the night, some saw young men speeding away on motorbikes after they'd shattered glass cases protecting the statues and hacked off the stone and marble Buddhas' noses and hands.

Before dawn Friday, police transported four suspects to the scene of a crime that has outraged their nation: A roadside in southern India, where the men are accused of gang-raping a woman, suffocating her and setting her body on fire.

On a roadside in northern Sri Lanka, a dozen women in bright-colored saris squat in the shade of an open canvas tent, waving tattered photographs at passing cars. They're school portraits, now yellowing, of their children who disappeared more than a decade ago in the country's civil war.

The women weep and nod as each tells her own son's or daughter's story. Kasipillai Romee was 16. She wanted to be a doctor. Sheeva Kumar was 20. He went to work and never came home. Rajendran Uday was 22 when soldiers came at midnight and took him away.

Thousands of Buddhists from all over the world made a pilgrimage this fall to a monastery high in India's Himalayas. Orange-robed monks with shaved heads huddled cross-legged on the floor, as Tibetan opera singers in multicolored gowns teetered under the weight of giant silver headdresses. They carried fruit baskets as offerings and chanted in unison, all praying for the same thing: the Dalai Lama's longevity.

Wednesday marks 150 years since the birth of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Better known as the Mahatma, or great soul, Gandhi was an Indian lawyer who led his country to freedom from British colonial rule in 1947. He was assassinated months later at age 78.

Gandhi is most famous for his philosophy of nonviolence that has inspired civil rights leaders around the world. But his legacy is facing fresh scrutiny against modern ideas about race, feminism and nationalism.

More than 36 hours after India lost contact with an unmanned spacecraft it was trying to land near the moon's South Pole, scientists appear to have located it on the moon's surface. But there's no word on what condition it's in.

On the eve of India's surprise Aug. 5 takeover of Kashmir, Sanna Shah was sitting cross-legged on a silk carpet, trying to enjoy the folk singers performing at her cousin's wedding in the state's summer capital, Srinagar.

Nobody could concentrate on the music. Tens of thousands of Indian troops were pouring into Kashmir, already a heavily militarized area. Wedding guests were increasingly worried, trying to figure out what was going on.

Last year, a long-distance truck driver, Mohammad Hashim, was hauling a load of refrigerators out of New Delhi when a dozen strangers on motorbikes forced him off the road.

They pulled him out of his truck and demanded he open the back. They wanted to see if Hashim was transporting cows or beef — which is illegal in many Indian states, because cows are sacred in Hinduism, the majority religion in India.

As tensions continued high between India and Pakistan over the disputed region of Kashmir, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Thursday that his government's decision to revoke Kashmir's special status marked "a new era" that would free the region of "terrorism and separatism."

India's government on Monday took the extraordinary step of revoking Kashmir's constitutionally guaranteed special status, a move that would tighten its control over the country's only Muslim-majority state.

In a decree issued by President Ram Nath Kovind, Article 370 of India's Constitution was rescinded amid protests and criticism of the move, which would turn the state into a union territory.

When Tinak Bhansali arrived for freshman orientation last month at the SRM Institute of Science and Technology, one of India's elite engineering schools, he was nervous and excited. It was his first time away from his hometown, New Delhi. This was his dream school — a bucolic 250-acre campus in southern India, with palm trees, sprawling stucco buildings and cricket fields.

The rains were late in parts of India this year, but the monsoon has finally arrived. It's bringing welcome relief from the heat but also some dangers. NPR's Lauren Frayer reports from Mumbai where they got more than a foot of rain in 24 hours.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency order early Friday prohibiting U.S. airlines from flying through a specific part of Iranian airspace, citing an "inadvertent risk" to civilian airplanes after Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance drone.

Elizabeth Taylor's jewels sparkled, but a collection of Indian gems might outshine them.

When the group of Indian jewelry and artifacts goes on auction today in New York, it's expected to fetch more than $115 million — breaking the record set by the late Hollywood star's jewelry collection.

Bindu Sampath listens over and over to a voicemail of the giggling granddaughter she's never met. She wonders if she ever will.

Sampath's daughter Nimisha, the child's mother, abruptly left their native India three years ago. She'd gone to dental school a few hundred miles north of their hometown in the southwestern state of Kerala. It was there that she met her future husband. She converted to Islam from Hinduism, and he from Christianity. Authorities say they both joined ISIS.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been reelected and his party is poised to take more seats than the 2014 election, signaling India's support of the strongman leader and his Hindu nationalist ideology.

The voting lasted almost six weeks to accommodate nearly 900 million people who were eligible to cast their votes.

It looks like a landslide victory for Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India. Votes are still being counted today after elections that lasted six weeks. NPR's Lauren Frayer has been following all of it, and she joins us live from Mumbai.